It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…

Preparation is a concept that struck me the other day as I re-considered the Final Four run. That was in my mind because I was pondering the potential three games that could occur this week against any combination of three games in the NCAA tournament run. (More on that later this week.)

One of the memories that struck me was how incredibly prepared the team was for the Kansas game on what was really 36 hours turnaround. It was impressive watching Mike Jones bark out the Kansas plays as if he had five days to scout the Jayhawks. And that took me to later this week, when VCU faces a gauntlet of teams on three straight days.

How does the process of scouting change for something odd like this, when there's no midweek/weekend/midweek drum beat? I'm not talking about specific teams per se; rather the mechanics behind how it all comes together when you have to play three different teams over three straight days.

Thanks to Chris Kowalczyk for getting the question asked and answered, we know how Shaka Smart will approach this week:

We obviously
have one coach who is in charge of the scouting report for Memphis and so he
and I are working together, as we normally would, for our next game, preparing
the team for what we’re going to need to do against Memphis. And then, our
other two assistant coaches are working on the other two teams on our side of
the bracket, Minnesota and Duke, and so whichever team we end up playing in game
two one of those coaches will obviously have that scout prepared and we’ll add
to it based on what we see down there.

You’re allowed to live scout at these
types of events. You’re allowed to watch the other teams play. And then, as for the third game, after the first
game, we’ll kind of reset and the two coaches that don’t have the scout for the
second game will take the two potential opponents for the third game. But we’ve
done some early prep work on all the teams obviously with the majority of our
focus on Memphis.

There you go. It's not ideal playing high level teams with little prep time. Then again it's not ideal, ever, facing havoc. It's a two-way street.